gzt: RBI is on the way. But many rural and semi-rural users will still disagree with you at this point in time.

Yep, rural is still bad, but no worse than rural in basically every country on the planet. The way the media go on about it you would think that every other country gets super fast speeds in the most remote locations.

If I hear them describe our broadband as "third world" again I might just throw up.

Here is an example. Many people talk about how awesome uk broadband is but then you read this from a few days ago

The most recent example I recall was from Stephen Fry who was comparing broadband speed in his NZ hotel to broadband speed at his home in central London if I recall correctly. Not like for like at all.

NonprayingMantis: I think kiwis have become so used to the media talking about how rubbish NZ broadband is at every opportunity, that they just believe it, when actually it's not true. Our broadband speeds are good, and data caps are starting to disappear as an issue, and all this long before ufb has any sort of impact.

gzt: The most recent example I recall was from Stephen Fry who was comparing broadband speed in his NZ hotel to broadband speed at his home in central London if I recall correctly. Not like for like at all.

What is the most recent example you recall?

It's even more different than that. He was comparing his speed when throttled to his full speed connection in the uk. His actual no throttled speed would have been fine.

And don't make the mistake of thinking that broadband in the uk is all unlimited, just check out BTs current plans. 10gb, 40gb, and unlimited. (The unlimited shapes p2p, there is No option to get a bigger cap that isnt shaped other than paying overage which costs 10bucks for 5GB)

Sure those plans are a bit cheaper than we have, but not by a lot. The 40GB plan, including landline, costs 30 quid a month, about 60 bucks, only a little cheaper than a lot of NZ ISPs are selling similar plans for. Hardy the vast chasm that the NZ media would have you believe exists between us and them.

gzt: The most recent example I recall was from Stephen Fry who was comparing broadband speed in his NZ hotel to broadband speed at his home in central London if I recall correctly. Not like for like at all.

What is the most recent example you recall?

It's even more different than that. He was comparing his speed when throttled to his full speed connection in the uk. His actual no throttled speed would have been fine.

And don't make the mistake of thinking that broadband in the uk is all unlimited, just check out BTs current plans. 10gb, 40gb, and unlimited. (The unlimited shapes p2p, there is No option to get a bigger cap that isnt shaped other than paying overage which costs 10bucks for 5GB)

Sure those plans are a bit cheaper than we have, but not by a lot. The 40GB plan, including landline, costs 30 quid a month, about 60 bucks, only a little cheaper than a lot of NZ ISPs are selling similar plans for. Hardy the vast chasm that the NZ media would have you believe exists between us and them.

http://store.virginmedia.com/broadband/compare-broadband/index.html

weird, i see them having cheaper 30 megabit than our plans, and 100 megabit comparable to our plans, each with unlimited data.

Also, if you compare it to average pay in NZ, then NZ is more expensive still.

Download: "96 per cent of subscribers now downloading at speeds between 1.5 to 24 megabits per second, up from 86 per cent last year. The number of subscribers in the slowest download category - less than 1.5Mbps - fell to two per cent from 12 per cent"

Upload: "Uploading speeds were rising, but most subscribers were still in the slow speed category of less than 1.5Mbps. Twenty-seven per cent of broadband subscribers were enjoying upload speeds faster than that, up from 18 per cent last year"

Splitting the band at 1.5 is a little misleading. Below around 2.5 - 3Mbps services like QuickFlix (with little client caching due to drm restrictions) are not viable. Skype performance may also be an issue.

1. When capped the internet is basically unusable. Speedtest.net won't even load reliably seems to be common. We pages take over half a minute to show "some" content even when you've been to the page before, and people often think not that the internet is slow, but that the internet is broken.

2. International performance is pretty bad, partially due to the majority of internet in NZ using low-grade international bandwidth - this can cause issues from packet loss and reduced speeds, to web sites being unavailable, to increased latency. This is made worse by New Zealand being far away for the majority of sites. People sometimes refer to "bittorrent" speeds, which make use of lots of connections, but if doing a simple skype call internationally or downloading a web site from a local web server in europe there can be subpar performance.

That said - there are quite a few other countries in similar prediciments to us. South Africa, Argentina, Chile, China, and most small island countries have similar issues.

Sure, you can say let's just have more cdn's in New Zealand, but the Akamai CDN's that are here don't cache a lot of moderately accessed content. If you try a download, find it slow, then redownload it, it could be fast, then wait a day or two, and redownload it it could be slow again. By slow I'm meaning like 5 megabit -

Now, if we want fast internet, for real users, we need to get our "average" download speeds up to say 20 megabit/sec, regardless of content/data.

Steam has recently moved to http invalidating the steam caches, for some content, so Steam's slow, again. Akamai runs out of cache space. Cachefly tend to be fast as they have a CDN in Sydney, and seem to not have to go to origin servers constantly.

That said, once you're downloading at 20megabit/sec that's 2.5megabytes/sec, so 130 megabytes/minute, 7800 megabytes/hour. On top of that upload is usually charged for too, which is around 1/30th of download speed (tends to be higher for things like bittorrent with lots of connections, and extra protocol overhead though) so 7800*31/30 is 8060 - so basically 8 gig/hour.

So if you leave a download going for 10 hours, you're at 80 gig in one day. That's about as much as would generally be considered reasonable usage for a home user to my mind - and say you do that 5 days in a month, you're already pushing 400 gig. But on top of that the net has a lot of random small traffic that comes in regardless of user initiation. And doing things like leaving skype, or blizzard's patch updater or a web page open can increase bandwidth use.

Anyway in line with that thinking, for non-invasive maybe heavy, but not extreme users 500gigabytes/month sounds reasonable. Instead a lot of users have 5gb, and 10 gb limits. And are just moving onto 40 gig limits.

We're not going to be at a point for home users doing offsite backups or heavy remote storage any time soon. Instead, if a home user wants redundancy they're meant to have RAID, and an external hard-disk - so say 3 hard-disks. But with fibre networks, in theory, you should be able to store all of your data remotely - if you have 200 gig of storage it should be cheaper to host off-site than locally as 3tb hard-disks are around twice the price of 500 gig hard-disks.

We're not really doing anything futuristic with fibre. We're mostly playing catch up - but even with that, we're not doing the simple things that could enable users to have higher access speeds right now. Like enabling Annex-M on the Chorus Cabinets which would allow users to double their upload speeds.

There also seems to be little chance of NZ improving international speeds to distant locations. The thing is, because international speeds are generally believed to be slow in NZ, there's little reason to improve the international speeds, but instead to keep them in line with other provider... as long as it's not so bad people will leave why change it?

There's also little chance of Akamai speeds improving in the short term. Facebook used to host their images on Akamai in NZ, but recently they've hopped around a bit. Some users seem to be getting images on https, and some on http. The https speeds compared to NZ speeds are about 1/10th, as https has a higher overhead with new connections to remote servers, and California is about 130 msec away from Auckland, and DSL overhead is around 10 msec for Auckland, 20 msec for Christchurch, 30 msec for Dunedin. Fibre should reduce these figures by 5 msec compared to DSL, but will make no difference to the international latency.

On top of that, a lot of DSL routers/modems provided by ISP's aren't really that great - and could lead to performance deficincies too. What would be cool, with UFB is something that does hardware forwarding like what google's bringing out for their fibre deployment.

http://fiber.google.com/about/

What I believe would have been better is to have gigabit speeds for "on-site" traffic, and 100 megabit, or less for national, 30 megabit or less for international etc.

Download: "96 per cent of subscribers now downloading at speeds between 1.5 to 24 megabits per second, up from 86 per cent last year. The number of subscribers in the slowest download category - less than 1.5Mbps - fell to two per cent from 12 per cent"

Upload: "Uploading speeds were rising, but most subscribers were still in the slow speed category of less than 1.5Mbps. Twenty-seven per cent of broadband subscribers were enjoying upload speeds faster than that, up from 18 per cent last year"

Splitting the band at 1.5 is a little misleading. Below around 2.5 - 3Mbps services like QuickFlix (with little client caching due to drm restrictions) are not viable. Skype performance may also be an issue.

2 megabit seriously hinders internet, 6 megabit isn't too bad with a single user, but with multiple users it can be pretty bad.

The slow uploads are a serious concern to my mind, and is really where NZ's problems lie. Cable's boosting the upload figures, but for the majority of users they're on telecom/chorus adsl equipment which could be enabled for annex-m with the existing hardware increasing upload speeds, and reducing latency.

At the moment if you're not in a fibre or vdsl area, and a home user, to get higher upload speed you really need to bond multiple connections together. Like get say 4 naked dsl connections, to get 3.2 megabit/sec upload. (if you're not in a vdsl area, your upload is likely to be more like 800 kbit than 1 megabit taking into account dsl overhead)

gzt: The most recent example I recall was from Stephen Fry who was comparing broadband speed in his NZ hotel to broadband speed at his home in central London if I recall correctly. Not like for like at all.

What is the most recent example you recall?

It's even more different than that. He was comparing his speed when throttled to his full speed connection in the uk. His actual no throttled speed would have been fine.

And don't make the mistake of thinking that broadband in the uk is all unlimited, just check out BTs current plans. 10gb, 40gb, and unlimited. (The unlimited shapes p2p, there is No option to get a bigger cap that isnt shaped other than paying overage which costs 10bucks for 5GB)

Sure those plans are a bit cheaper than we have, but not by a lot. The 40GB plan, including landline, costs 30 quid a month, about 60 bucks, only a little cheaper than a lot of NZ ISPs are selling similar plans for. Hardy the vast chasm that the NZ media would have you believe exists between us and them.

http://store.virginmedia.com/broadband/compare-broadband/index.html

weird, i see them having cheaper 30 megabit than our plans, and 100 megabit comparable to our plans, each with unlimited data.

Also, if you compare it to average pay in NZ, then NZ is more expensive still.

You do however have to factor in that Virgin Media's HFC network footprint is tiny compared to the size of the UK.

gzt: The most recent example I recall was from Stephen Fry who was comparing broadband speed in his NZ hotel to broadband speed at his home in central London if I recall correctly. Not like for like at all.

What is the most recent example you recall?

It's even more different than that. He was comparing his speed when throttled to his full speed connection in the uk. His actual no throttled speed would have been fine.

And don't make the mistake of thinking that broadband in the uk is all unlimited, just check out BTs current plans. 10gb, 40gb, and unlimited. (The unlimited shapes p2p, there is No option to get a bigger cap that isnt shaped other than paying overage which costs 10bucks for 5GB)

Sure those plans are a bit cheaper than we have, but not by a lot. The 40GB plan, including landline, costs 30 quid a month, about 60 bucks, only a little cheaper than a lot of NZ ISPs are selling similar plans for. Hardy the vast chasm that the NZ media would have you believe exists between us and them.

http://store.virginmedia.com/broadband/compare-broadband/index.html

weird, i see them having cheaper 30 megabit than our plans, and 100 megabit comparable to our plans, each with unlimited data.

Also, if you compare it to average pay in NZ, then NZ is more expensive still.

You do however have to factor in that Virgin Media's HFC network footprint is tiny compared to the size of the UK.

I wasn't aware of that. I know one guy in the UK, and he refused to deal with them as he'd moved into a place that used to have it, and they kept sending him stuff, and he tried to explain the situation to them, and they were being difficult because he wasn't a customer I think. In the end he had DSL which was subpar, although not quite as bad as NZ. This was in BUBA days. He also had a strangely low mtu. I wonder what his net is like now.

I suppose virgin media cable is probably like telstraclear cable for locations? like in Christchurch, a lot of places had it, but a lot of places didn't too. And if you were in an area that didn't have it and need to get DSL you paid extra for a phone line.

mercutio: The slow uploads are a serious concern to my mind, and is really where NZ's problems lie.

Yup. I need to get ~250 GB to the US in the near future and I'm not looking forward to uploading that at 1 Mb/s. I think it may actually be quicker to record it to Blu-ray and post it (I haven't done the calcs to confirm this).

I've talked to several ISPs and the only one prepared to give me a faster connection is Telecom, and unfortunately the monthly fee is a small fortune with a 24-month contract that I simply can't justify.

mercutio:?The slow uploads are a serious concern to my mind, and is really where NZ's problems lie.

Yup. I need to get ~250 GB to the US in the near future and I'm not looking forward to uploading that at 1 Mb/s. I think it may actually be quicker to record it to Blu-ray and post it (I haven't done the calcs to confirm this).

I've talked to several ISPs and the only one prepared to give me a faster connection is Telecom, and unfortunately the monthly fee is a small fortune with a 24-month contract that I simply can't justify.

i imagine you know about lzma/7zip which can help slightly with compressable data, but yeh, even on 10 megabit upload that's going to be annoying.

mercutio: The slow uploads are a serious concern to my mind, and is really where NZ's problems lie.

Yup. I need to get ~250 GB to the US in the near future and I'm not looking forward to uploading that at 1 Mb/s. I think it may actually be quicker to record it to Blu-ray and post it (I haven't done the calcs to confirm this).

I've talked to several ISPs and the only one prepared to give me a faster connection is Telecom, and unfortunately the monthly fee is a small fortune with a 24-month contract that I simply can't justify.

dukester: I heard an item on the radio this morning that slow broadband was no 1 on the list of things that annoy kiwis. Sometimes its not the speed of the broadband.

These are the people who completely ignore the fact that most speed problems happen inside their property - no proper filter/split, corroded wiring, multiple devices on same line, etc...

Possibly. However out here, its because of the wonderful BUBA product and the dimensioning that comes with it.

But the vast majority of users in NZ are now on EUBA, and there exists no real reasons for ISP's to have BUBA users who are on a EUBA cabable ISAM. If you're on an BUBA connection and connected to an ISAM you should ask your ISP to migerate you across.